Judging a Book By Its Cover Part 3 cont. It’s Your Turn!

I did a shout out for 20 other author/writers to share their book covers with us and to tell us how they decided on their covers. I still need about 7 more, so if you’d like a mini promo of your cover email me🙂

Okay remember we are not judging the books by their covers! In this post I want you to look at what the author/writer goes through and the steps they take to create their covers to make them uniquely theirs. And if they have had someone else design them they are sharing the links to their designers.

Here’s the first five! These are in the order they were received.

Our first cover is from Julia Hughes author of “A Ripple In Time”

Welcome Julia🙂

Thank you for this opportunity to show off our book covers, and I’d like to nominate the artwork for “A Ripple in Time”, which is an “alternative world/time travel” romance, and part of the Celtic Cousins’ Adventures series.
I feel it not only captures the essence of the story without words, which is the purpose of a book cover, but it is also simply beautiful. My input was practically zero – I wanted time to be represented, and suggested either dandelions, or a sun dial – as you can see from this cover I got both!
I love the ethereal quality Monica has brought to the design, and the striking image created, by Alessandro, of the angel holding the Titanic on the palm of her hand. By happy co-incidence, Monica recently posted “From concept to cover – the journey of A Ripple in Time” a fascinating insight into the birth of a book cover!

With regard to your own series, in my opinion, you should definitely go for at least one feature in common, even if it’s only the font for “Chris’s Journey” and your name.

Thank you Julia for sharing your cover with us. To find out more about Julia and her books

Hi Kimmie Welcome to Karen’s Corners. Please tell us about how your cover came to be.

The cover was designed by Patricia Rasch and the photographer is Archie Brown. The concept was my idea though. Neither of them have websites.

The cover of my novel was my brain child, I wanted to convey the jist of the story on the cover. The main character is standing up front with her arms folded.

The title came to me during a conversation with one of my closest friend, when she described a situation at work as “this side of crazy.” I was half way through writing my novel when this inaction occured and it described the storyline completely.

Patricia Rasch chose the colors and add in the hand cuffs and whip on the back cover because she felt this would add to the over all feel. The link for the book is http://goo.gl/Jkv55. This is very interesting. I never thought about the whole process of how I came up with my book cover. Thank you for the motivation you provided to analysis what each author does to present their work.

Hi Harold thank you for sharing your cover with us🙂 Who’s idea was it for the design of your cover?

The design was my idea. The bloody baseball is held by a lawyer in a pin striped suit which suggests that the ball was used as an instrument of criminality. The presentation of the ball suggests it is a piece of evidence for a jury to ponder.Thanks again, Harold

Hi Alexes. Thank you and welcome. Please tell us how you decided on the cover for “Khe”

The cover art for my science/fantasy adventure, Khe,was done by my hockey teammate, Tony Honkawa, a professional graphics designer. It was a great experience working with him. Because my main character is an alien, I sent him her physical description from the book as a starting point. He sent back three comps. I picked the one that felt closest to my vision, had him swap out colors, and give her different eyes. It took a fair amount of back and forth, and my wonderful crit group chiming in with their opinions, but in the end, I was very happy with the outcome.I would be honored to be a part of your blog discussion.Thank you.

Hi Karen,
Here’s a bit about my cover. I hope you find it interesting!

Hi Roy and Wow, you put a lot into your cover!My book is a fairy tale epic fantasy type story, sort of a Brother’s Grim meets Lord Of The Rings. In this case the main thrust of the plot my fairy tale heroes get involved in centers around the broken remains of Cinderella’s legendary glass slippers. So the title was a no brainer in a sense. The first thing I did before I even started writing the book was to develop the logo that I could brand anything with going forward. I wanted to evoke a sense of fantasy. so I developed the logo from several different typefaces and further tweaked the art to make that it was much more unique. Fairy tales have a sort of built in visual recognition, and symbolism so subsequent art and ultimately the book cover would play to that strength. But in the story Cinderella is the evil queen. So the vision of a woman holding a glass slipper certainly conveys the fairy tale aspect, but there is a sense of corruption, and brooding in the way Cinderella regards the slipper in the art. This is not a Cinderella with a happily ever after. The cover art shows an intact Glass slipper, but the title says otherwise. Hopefully it intrigues the potential reader to find out what happened.
aside from the logo, I kept the rest of the type to one font a modern serif- too many fonts is visually distracting.The work is created digitally using 3d models to better control lighting colors, posing and camera angles. I can take the same “Cinderella” file from the the cover and utilize her in different scenes, explore different light and even animate her for the book trailer- kinda of like my own digital photo studio!
Since my book is also published in paperback, my back cover art features more fairy tale characters (also created digitally) as they are in my story to further enforce the back cover synopsis.I am the author but also the artist. In my day job, I am a professional graphic artist for over 20 years and had studied art throughout my schooling. It was important for me to be in control of my own book from cover to marketing and I had to find a publisher that would respect that. Padwolf Publishing has been very accommodating. I have since come on board as their “art director” and am in the process of rebranding and updating the book covers for most of their entire catalog for ebook release and reprinting, as well as creating new cover art for their new releases. In all, I’ve done about a two dozen book covers now.This is just my opinion, but I am largely unimpressed with most of the book cover trends these days that the big six put out and the subsequent emulation by the small press and self pubbers. Not everybody of course, but my overall impression is it’s getting lazy and that maybe indicative of the popularity of the ebook markets.Here’s the link to my book on amazon ( the kindle edition also features additional artwork through out )http://www.amazon.com/Shards-The-Glass-Slipper-ebook/dp/B007V538QA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1349097040&sr=8-2&keywords=shards+of+the+glass+slipperThank you very much for this opportunity to share!
-Roy Mauritsen

Okay that’s our covers for today. Tomorrow I will have an interview with Daniel Quentin Steele, so stop by and hear what he’s up to and say hello.🙂 And on Thursday I will have covers featured from Rebecca, Mirti, Casey, Chris, and John!

Thanks for featuring my science/fantasy novel, Khe, in this very interesting discussion. It’s fascinating to see how we all come up with our covers. You can find my book on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00987OLVU